The article offers an insight into the Slavonic contemporary etymological research and its new possibilities. Modern etymology has witnessed a seachange that can be referred to as a digital breakthrough. Thanks to the Internet and electronic media the etymologists today have easier access to historicallinguistic, dialectal and onomastic sources as well as to etymological dictionaries. They also better access to many monographs and studies. Moreover, today the etymologist has no problems making use of analogous materials published in foreign languages, the obtaining of which in the past had posed a major problem. This will clearly accelerate progress in etymological research, thereby opening up new vistas for etymology. We can research effectively the origins of dialectal and colloquial words as well as words no longer in use, a task which had earlier been very difficult.

This article is a presentation of the EtymArab© project, a start-up (“zero”) version of an etymological dictionary of Modern Standard Arabic. Taking the etymology of some generosity-related lexical items as examples, the study introduces the reader to the guiding ideas behind the project and the online dictionary’s basic features.

This article is a presentation of the EtymArab© project, a start-up (“zero”) version of an etymological dictionary of Modern Standard Arabic. Taking the etymology of some generosity-related lexical items as examples, the study introduces the reader to the guiding ideas behind the project and the online dictionary’s basic features.

The papers of this series examine various domains of the Egyptian core lexicon in order to evidence to what degree the basic vocabulary is of clearly Semitic vs. African cognacy. The fourth part focuses on the Ancient Egyptian anatomical terminology of the back parts from the head to the upper torso.

More than 30 years ago Andrzej Zaborski (1983; 1987 {1983}) collected and analyzed all Cushitic and Omotic numerals, which were described in his time, and tried to analyze their internal structure. His two pioneering studies stimulated the present attempt to collect all available relevant data about Cushitic numerals and to analyze them in both genetic (Afroasiatic) and areal (Omotic, Ethio-Semitic and Nilo-Saharan) perspectives, all at the contemporary level of our knowledge. With respect to the long mutual interference between various groups of Cushitic and Omotic languages, it is necessary to study the numerals in both the language families together. The presented material is organized in agreement with the genetic classification of these languages. On the basis of concrete forms in individual languages the protoforms in partial groups are reconstructed, if it is possible, and these partial protoforms of numerals in the daughter protolanguages are finally compared to determine the inherited forms. The common cognates are finally compared with parallels in other Afroasiatic branches, if they exist, or with counterparts in Ethio-Semitic or Nilo-Saharan languages, if they could be borrowed from or adapted into the Cushitic or Omotic languages.

The lack of a comprehensive etymological dictionary of the best documented and, in many accounts, main Semitic language, i.e., Arabic, is a serious drawback for progress in our knowledge of the background and evolution of lexical studies of the whole Afrasian phylum. Any serious attempt at achieving that goal would require a team of a number of scholars working hard during several years; however, in the meantime, a modest shortcut could be to consecrate some personal efforts in that direction on a single important Arabic dialect, and this is what we are presently trying to bring about, within the project of a linguistic encyclopaedia of Andalusi Arabic. So far, our endeavours have cast some new lights of lexical borrowing not only from well-known cases of Aramean and Persian origins, but also, e.g., from Akkadian and Old Egyptian, as well as a rather detailed account of phonetic changes and lexical composition scarcely detected or never heretofore suspected and having often prevented the recognition of the true etyma of Semitic and non-Semitic stock, of which the present article is, of course, only a résumé and introduction.

For Plato, language was the way to cognize the universe. The philosophy of language, which was primarily initiated by Plato in the Cratylus, still has not received answers to the questions settled by this great Greek thinker. In fact, it just offered various solutions formed in different conceptions and approaches in the ancient, scholastic, modern and postmodern periods. The questions raised by Plato in his dialogue have been continued in various nativistic theories of language, especially in works of Noam Chomsky. Language—as it is seen by Plato, i.e., as uniting our inner world with the outer world, is a significant feature of humankind, is still underinvestigated.

In this article, the author analyzes the terms for ‘woodpecker’ in the dialects of the Slavic languages, using the materials of the General Slavic Linguistic Atlas (OLA). The analysis contains two parts: the fi rst refers to the geographical distribution of the terms for ‘woodpecker’ in the Slavic-speaking area according to the stations covered by the OLA – about 850 settlements in the Slavic-speaking territory; the second part includes etymological and semantic analysis of the individual terms. From the analysis, it can be concluded that there is a great lexical diversity of these terms in the dialects of the Slavic languages, although the term dětьlъ is dominant in the Slavic-speaking area. Lexical diversity largely depended on the surrounding. Other factors, such as the contacts with other linguistic populations, infl uenced too. Recognizing the origin of the individual terms, we can establish that the forms are most often processed by onomatopoeia. But apart from the audacious perception, the motives for naming the woodpecker arose from the visual perception – the color of the feather, as well as the abilities characteristic of this kind of bird.